SPLEEN is the personal blog of Stephen Judd

All posts tagged "neil postman"

I meant to add a bit more last night, but I was too zonked to think clearly about it.

Postman seems to say that with television, the entertainment via an ever-changing sequence of blocks that cause emotional stimulation is the thing. (This is why news shows need theme music and expressive newsreaders -- without the music and the mugging for the camera, you'd have to figure out how to respond to the news yourself, and that wouldn't be so entertaining).

For me web browsing is similar, but different in an important way. There's still an ever-changing sequence, and there's still a lack of connection and context. Eg, sites like Metafilter (or digg or Fark or YouTube or BoingBoing or even the highbrow Arts and Letters Daily) present us with one thing after another, with no connecting thread of argument or thought. Sometimes, what they present is thematically connected, but often it's not. In contrast to television the entertainment is often not in the emotional content, but in the receipt of a novel packet of information. The text can be dense, the sense rich.

Last week I got a 30% off voucher from Borders, so I wandered down to see whether I could find anything I wanted. This violates my usual book buying policy, which is recherché books online, bestsellers at Borders, and browsing at Unity. But... 30% off.

I ended up with a copy of Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death.

I first encountered Postman when I acquired a copy of a lecturer's course notes while working as an IT support person at the School of Education at the University of Waikato. In those days, there were still some hardy Marxists who had survived the merger of the university's Department of Education with Hamilton Teachers' College, and I would talk with them as I fixed their computers. (For all I know they are still locking horns with their vocationally orientated colleagues, and I hope so.) Anyway, these notes contained a lengthy and fascinating excerpt from this book, which has been on my "must read someday" list ever since.

Postman's argument goes more or less like this:

different media favour different modes of discourse

print favours sequential, logical argument and dense information

electronic media, starting with the telegraph and culminating in television, favour disconnected snippets, light on information, chosen largely for emotional impact, and produced for entertainment above all else (the book predates widespread internet by more than a decade)

television as the dominant medium has a devastating effect on public discourse, as it replaces argument with entertainment

this is why politicians' policy positions have become subordinate to their ability to connect emotionally with the public on camera

There's more to it than that, of course.

Postman's account of the news show as vaudeville performance, whose reference to real events is only for the purpose of stimulating entertaining emotion, is as true now as it was when he wrote it. His description of the weakening attention span of the public -- from the book-reading, lecture-attending, Sitzfleisch of the 19th century to the channel-surfing 20 second boredom -- is damning.

At the end of the book, he suggests that there are two answers, one nonsensical, one desperate. The nonsensical one would be to start producing shows that deconstruct television, showing the audience how it manipulates their emotions and constructs argument out of nothing more that sequences of shots. He argues that such a show would have to be itself entertaining, or it could never be funded and broadcast, and that it would be funny along the lines of Monty Python and other shows that mocked television convention. "In order to command an audience large enough to make a difference, one would have to make the programs vastly amusing, in the television style. Thus the act of criticism itself would, in the end, be co-opted by television. The parodists would become celebrities..." Well, hello Jon Stewart.

The desperate answer, according to Postman, would be to add education about the workings of television to the school curriculum. I have no idea whether this has happened or not, but I think that's what the fuddy duddy complaints about media literacy in the English syllabus are about. But judging purely by, say, the content of the comments on the NZ Herald site and Stuff, it's not working.

In summary, Amusing Ourselves to Death is a depressing read.

I find it interesting to try to extend the book's message to the web-dominated milieu I live in. I've forsaken the emotional farce of "serious" television for the textual web. It's hopeful, isn't it, that densely argued text is fighting a rear-guard action against television? I don't know. LOLcats and Youtube make that a dubious position to hold.

But anyway, I've decided to extend my entertainment fast a little further. I have held out against Twitter and Facebook quite happily, but that still leaves massive gobblers of my attention: certain blogs and news sites I find myself checking multiple times a day, like Metafilter and Public Address System. I'm taking a break from them for a while too. At least until March. Maybe longer. I've been getting my willpower muscle back into shape, and now I'm going to exercise it a bit harder.